Saturday, April 23, 2016

Margaret Wente: Plagiarism then – and now?

Margaret
Wente begins her article "The
great global greening is happening now" with an anecdote about
bears encroaching on her romantic country retreat north of Toronto.Her fourth paragraph begins,“Agriculture has always been the greatest destroyer of nature”.

Jesse
Ausubel begins his article, "The
return of nature"with an anecdote about the return of bears to
the Apshawa Preserve in New Jersey.His fourth paragraph begins, “Agriculture
has always been the greatest destroyer of nature”

Ms. Wente
does not put Ausubel’s sentence in quotes. Four paragraphs later, she mentions
him, and remarkably, links to his article.One wonders if her editors checked the link. Apart from the identical sentence,
further similar material not enclosed in quotes, and some wording identical to a
different author at the end of her column, the opening seems, to a non-expert
at least, embarrassingly similar to Ausubel.

But this is
classic Wente;start with a few
paragraphs of folksy anecdote which make it seem that what follows arises from some personal insight. Add some easy
swipes at “elites”, academics and environmentalists, and some filler from the
New York Times or any
number of sources.

Again
before mentioning Mr. Ausubel, Wente observes:

“One recent study found that
high-yield farmers in the European Union increased their yields by 22 per cent
while also reducing their chemical pesticide use by 37 per cent.”

Ausubel writes that this study:

“funded by the German government and the European Union,
found a 37 percent decline in chemical pesticide use while crop yields rose 22
percent”.

Had sheincluded in quotation marks his material,
she would have avoided the error she makes in suggesting the global meta data
analysis to which he refers was a study of only European Union farmers. Further on, more paraphrase without direct attribution.

Wente: If we can get a grip on food waste, stop producing corn to feed cars,
boost yields to the level of the most productive farmers and eat more food that
is efficient to produce… we could liberate an area the size of India from
agricultural production.

Ausubel: If we
keep lifting average yields…stop feeding corn to cars, restrain our diets
lightly, and reduce waste, then an area the size of India or of the United
States east of the Mississippi could be released globally from agriculture over
the next 50 years or so.

Towards the end of her column, Wente also appears to borrow from an earlier
article by Maywa
Montenegro, a researcher
at Berkley (emphasis added):

“Very few technologies
truly merit the epithet “game changer”
— but a new genetic engineering tool known as CRISPR-Cas9 is one of them...With
CRISPR (the technology’s shorthand name), precision
and speed have soared…CRISPR opens
the door to all kinds of potential food production improvements”.

Wente:

“And now we have a new game-changer, in the form of a
revolutionary gene-editing tool called CRISPR. This tool (whose name is short
for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) offers a new
level of speed, precision and
versatility, and opens the door to vast
new food production improvements”.

Ms. Wente
doesn’t cite or link to Montenegro’s article – which is informative, nuanced and
less celebratory, but instead ‘leaps’ to a surprising conclusion.

There are certainly
very legitimate criticisms to be made of the Leap Manifesto.It should be noted though, that the document does
not appear to mention GMO or food production, so it’s
difficult to find anything substantive in Ms. Wente’s borrowings to convince
readers that its authors “would rather have the world’s billions eating mouldy,
stunted potatoes that exhaust the soil and suck up all the water”, though no doubt
certain readers enjoyed her image of forcing Naomi Klein and other ‘elites’ to
“try it for themselves”.

While not
as extensive
as previous instances of plagiarism, it’s reasonable to ask to what extent The
Globe condones
certain practices on the part of certain writers. Last night, I observed to a friend who
mentioned Ms. Wente that I’d stopped reading her quite a while ago.Today I clicked.Certainly the adolescent quality of her
swipes at environmentalists remains.Despite these, she herself seems to remain dedicated to recycling.

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As a former educator, lover of ideas and those who toil hard to produce original ones I applaud your efforts to set record straight on literary crime and ideas theft. I cannot read Wente out of anger at the disrespect she shows to the writing profession. Shame on the Globe who keep her on because she's paid by the number of clicks, popular because of button pushing but lazy and unethical.

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Thank you for this. Wente seems to be a bad combination of bigoted and lazy, and it is most reassuring to know that there are people who have enough reach to make a difference and a willingness to call her (and her editors) on her complete BS.

I found many similar problems with another recent piece as well. The link to the article and the original is below.

I read the article in the Guardian several days beforehand and was struck by the similarities.

While the author in the Guardian is cited, the entire piece by Wente, is at best, a summary. She even copied all of the same citations and displayed them in her piece as if she did the research herself.

I find it ridiculous that she can sustain a career by re-packaging the painstaking created, and trending work of her colleagues in such a lazy fashion.

I posted this comment on the G&M comments thread, but they rejected it, it seems (along with another comment on the matter). Here it is:

A writer who is flippant with their prose is no less flippant with their ideas. At some point, you have to wonder: would it matter if the G&M simply employed some kind of algorithm to produce its columns? It won't be too long, right? (Think of Tay "the Racist" Chatbox -- how long until these algorithms start producing full-length articles?) It seems pretty clear to me that the human writer in question, Ms Wente, is simply pulling a Tay (minus the racist screed), and that she really doesn't care about the issues that she purports to champion, but rather is a professional echo-box, peddling the same four or five narratives again and again, but with a different set of reconfigured prose each time. It is bound to happen every so often that the algorithm breaks down from time to time, and fails to properly scramble a sentence or two that's been lifted from elsewhere.

BTW: good job on spotting this, but Canadland.com has found a couple other cases too.

There is no valid reason that G&M couldn't run ALL text through a plagiarism-detection programs; there are many available. They could even post the scorecards of the reviews on-line to distinguish the original writers from the rest.

What a ridiculous argument. Wente is obviously a target because she speaks truths that you don't want to hear or agree with. Her comments about the dangerous Leapers are accurate whether you like them or not. Welcome to the Dark Ages.

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